


Preconceptions

by Sororising



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Fluff with bits of angst, Gift Exchange, Polyamory, Sexism, mention of slur for sex workers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-12 03:15:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9052987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sororising/pseuds/Sororising
Summary: “You love me anyway,” Nat said easily, and Sharon couldn’t help but smile at that. It had taken a long, long time before Nat was comfortable even hearing those words - having her speak them herself, in front of someone else, was the best gift Sharon could imagine.“I do,” she said, softly. She glanced at Sam. “I love you both.”This should be weird, maybe. But it wasn’t, not at all, and she was too glad of that to want to second-guess anything.“I love you too,” Nat said to Sam. “Platonically, of course.”Sam grinned. “No hetero, you mean?”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FrostyEmma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrostyEmma/gifts).



> For [frostyemma,](http://frostyemma.tumblr.com) as part of the [Sharon Carter Secret Santa Fic Exchange.](http://sharoncarterdaily.tumblr.com/post/152294476526/welcome-to-sharon-carter-secret-santa-gift) I really hope you enjoy this, please feel free to let me know if there's anything you aren't a huge fan of and I'll happily edit, I want your gift to be right for you! 
> 
> The [Madonna-whore complex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna%E2%80%93whore_complex) (terrible name I know, apologies) is a brief theme in this if anyone isn't familiar with it and would like to be. That's the only reason I used the slur tag in case anyone's worried.
> 
> Not Civil War compliant.

* * *

Sharon knew that if she ever told her co-workers who she really was, they’d assume she’d wanted to join SHIELD ever since she was a little girl. And – well, they wouldn’t be wrong, not exactly. She _had_ always wanted to be like her great-aunt Peggy, that was true, and she'd wanted to make her mark on the world. 

To make a difference.

She'd just ended up taking rather a roundabout path to get there. It had included half a degree in psychology, for one thing, where she'd taken a class on Freud – taught by a teacher who hated Freud's guts, it seemed like, but who managed to get past that enough to admit – very begrudgingly – that he'd had a few good points.

One of those was the Madonna-whore complex, which had struck a chord in Sharon's mind that had kept echoing throughout later years, striking her again and again in a background sort of way, making her notice little remarks in new lights.

After one of the incidents, she went to look it up again, deliberately facing it for the first time since college.

It hadn't been anything major this time. Nothing out of the ordinary, really, which in itself was irritating. Brock Rumlow, a junior agent who'd been part of the same group of trainees as Sharon – they'd tied for top place, which seemed to have put Sharon permanently on his bad side – had made some little comment when she'd thrown a few of her more inventive swear words at the new gun they'd been assigned to test.

She couldn't even remember exactly what he'd said; she'd been focusing on unblocking the chamber rather than paying attention to him. He'd made a fake little gasp, she knew that much, and then followed it up with some comment about that kind of language not being very _ladylike._

“Fuck off,” she’d said, half to the gun - where the hell did SHIELD get their hands on these experimental weapons, anyway? - and half to Rumlow.

Who gave a damn about being ladylike? What did that even mean, anyway?

But she’d looked up that half-remembered psychology lesson, read articles on how men so often liked to see women as some weird dichotomy, either virginal and chaste or femme fatale types who lived to lure men into wickedness, or some shit like that.

She’d closed the journal she’d been reading abruptly, put it back on the right shelf, and left the library, shaking her head a little, as though she could shake away the thought.

She couldn’t quite forget it though. Little comments grated on her in new ways. She looked up the lists of new SHIELD recruits, noticed again how many times the men outnumbered the women. She watched how other female agents were treated, saw that she and Maria - the only two white women - got more respect than the others. Melinda May was the best agent in years, and people - men and women both - constantly dismissed her abilities. Sharon had once overheard a new trainee saying that May shouldn’t get all the credit for her martial arts abilities because _it came naturally to her,_ or some bullshit like that.

That particular trainee had found himself on probation for quite some time. There were perks to having known the director all her life. 

So Sharon was lucky, in some ways, but that knowledge didn’t calm her anger in the slightest, not when she thought about And she knew she could have it so much worse if people ever found out that she was related to Director Carter.

At least she could prepare for that day, though. SHIELD taught them how to arm themselves with much more than just guns, and she’d never been the kind of person who was too proud to use their knowledge as its own kind of weapon.

Peggy had taught her many, many things over the years. That was just one of them.

* * *

Sharon had clocked out for the day, and she was just getting changed back into her civvies. She was alone in the changing room, for once, and she’d let her guard down - as much as she ever did, at least.

“Hello, Sharon Richards,” came a voice from behind her, and Sharon gritted her teeth together to keep from swearing.

SHIELD’s newest - well, newest recruit, technically, but Sharon still couldn’t quite get her head around that - walked round until they were facing each other.

That really should have been cause for more alarm, but in the weeks since the Black Widow had been officially cleared for operative status, she’d seemed determined to make as many people uneasy as she could manage.

Sharon relaxed her jaw in a deliberate motion, and finished pulling her top back on. Romanoff already made her feel scrutinised enough whenever the two of them interacted; she didn’t need to be literally half-naked for whatever this was going to be.

She really hoped she’d imagined the curious little emphasis on _Richards,_ but given who was talking to her, it’s very possible she hadn’t.

“Hi,” she said, not really bothering to colour her voice with the fake-friendliness all the more nervous agents used around the Widow.

Like she was going to garrotte anyone who treated her with bluntness instead of fear.

“I won’t tell anyone,” Romanoff said, sitting down on a bench and neatly folding her legs into the lotus position. Sharon tried not to look annoyed; she could only manage that herself when she used her hands to force her calves into place, and even then she could only ever hold it for a few seconds.

“Tell anyone what.”

She knew Romanoff would pick up on the lack of inflection, knew that they both knew what they were talking about. Working for an espionage agency meant that ninety percent of Sharon’s daily interactions had some kind of underlying meaning - not a malicious one, not most of the time; just the sense of a few unvoiced sentiments.

Romanoff just smiled, in that irritating way that made it clear she wasn’t going to play this game.

Sharon concentrated on pulling her hair back into its usual neat bun, then sighed when her hands fumbled with the elastic and half her hair fell out again. “Thanks,” she said, a little gruffly. “It’s - not easy, hiding it.”

She wondered why she cared so much. Peggy hadn’t want her to hide their connection; it had all been Sharon’s idea.

She twisted her hair up again; it held, this time, and she felt unsure for half a moment, wishing she still had something to occupy her hands with.

“I’m aware,” Romanoff said dryly. “I do know a little about working to overcome people’s preconceptions of who I am.”

Oh.

“Sorry,” Sharon said, her voice small. “I - wasn’t thinking.”

She knew - well, no. She _didn’t_ know how hard it must have been for someone like the Black Widow to adjust to life in SHIELD. Someone who was used to adapting themselves to any kind of life, yes, but always as a character, a persona, never as their true self.

Sharon wondered just how much of Agent Romanoff was a creation, an actor playing their latest role, and then she wondered if it really mattered.

“That’s alright,” Romanoff said, looking almost friendly. “Many Americans are bad at thinking. I will not hold it against you.”

Sharon found herself laughing, a short, startled laugh. She looked at Romanoff again, thought about how strange it must be for her here, uprooted and replanted in a world where everyone seemed to distrust her every move.

“Do you want to go for a drink?” Sharon asked, trying not to overthink her choice of words. 

Romanoff - _Natasha_ \- smiled, a lopsided little thing that made her look very different, somehow, in a way Sharon couldn’t put her finger on. “I do,” Natasha said, perfectly certain, as though she’d been waiting for the invitation all along.

* * *

As Sharon and Natasha grew to be friends, Sharon kept noticing the different ways people treated the two of them, and she remembered the Madonna-whore thing again and again.

It was a dichotomy she wasn’t sure they could ever defeat, and Sharon hated it with a fierceness that didn’t surprise her one bit, not when she thought some more about it.

It got worse after people found out about Peggy and Sharon being related. She’d known they would eventually, of course she had. And it had happened around the time Peggy was first diagnosed with dementia, so she hadn’t exactly been in a frame of mind to give a fuck about anything else happening at SHIELD.

She still noticed, of course. She couldn’t switch that off, not anymore.

People looked at her, and they saw exactly what they wanted to see. A goody-two-shoes. Stickler for the rules. _Ooh, don’t say that in front of Sharon, you know who her aunt is?_

And then they looked at Natasha, the Black Widow. They saw a seductress. Someone who couldn’t help but manipulate everyone around her, someone who made her living with lies and who surely took pleasure in that, because why else would she do it?

Fuck them all, Sharon thought, taking a vicious kind of pleasure in the knowledge that one of the things those kinds of people most hated was women swearing at them.

* * *

It took a long, long time for them to admit their feelings for one another. 

Sharon wasn’t quite sure they ever did, really. She kissed Nat after a very fraught mission, one where no-one had been quite sure if they would make it back, and she regretted it instantly.

But then Nat kissed back, and the next time they went out for drinks together she came back to Sharon’s apartment - just to watch TV and cuddle on the couch together, but that was more intimate than sex, in its own way - and things fell into place so easily after that that Sharon half wondered if she was in some kind of weird extended dream.

They kept their relationship quiet, but not from shame. Just - it wasn’t anyone else’s business. It was private, something just for the two of them. Sharon valued that more than she could say, and she knew that Nat felt the same way.

* * *

Nat phoned her an hour after the collapse of SHIELD.

“I’m sorry,” Nat said, her voice toneless, and Sharon bit her lip hard so she wouldn’t let out any kind of sound.

“It’s not your fault,” she said numbly. 

Oh, God. All that they had worked for. Everything Peggy has built, her life’s work -

Hydra.

God.

“I’m still sorry,” Nat said, very quiet. Sharon breathed into her pain, the way she did whenever she got bruised or cut on a mission, the way she did when she needed to stand strong and keep going, because there was someone depending on her.

Right now she wasn’t sure if that someone was Natasha, or herself. She didn’t think it mattered.

“I know,” she said. “It’ll be okay.”

She didn’t know how those words could ever come true, but she was determined not to make them a lie.

They would rebuild, somehow. She’d find a job with another agency for now, one with connections she could use. They would rise again, and not like Hydra, with their _cut off one head and two more grow in its place_ bullshit.

No. They would rise from their own ashes, a silent phoenix. 

They had to. Sharon couldn’t bear to think otherwise, not right now.

* * *

Sharon didn’t quite know what to think of Sam Wilson. Not the first time she met him, and not the second or the third.

The fourth time was at the kind of party that most everyone called a _gathering,_ put together by Tony and attended by various superheroes and their families - blood and otherwise - and friends.

Steve was away, somewhere in Eastern Europe, chasing down some feeling or instinct that would turn out to be another ghost-echo, no doubt. But Sam had grown to be part of the little mismatched group even without Steve, and so had Sharon, in her own way, and they found themselves in a corner together

Sharon wasn’t quite sure if things should be awkward or not, between the two of them.

“Figured we should stick together,” Sam said, grinning at her. “Regular humans, and all.”

“Who are you calling regular?” Sharon asked, raising an eyebrow.

Was she flirting? It kind of felt like she was flirting. 

“Well, you put up with Steve as a neighbour for however long,” Sam said, still with that smile on his face, the one that made her want to smile back. “I guess that could count as a superpower.”

“Fuck off,” she said lightly, jokingly, and she hated herself just a little - because she knew she was testing him, and she knew that he didn’t have a clue.

There were so many ways guys could respond to her swearing at them.

Call her _feisty,_ or some other word that would make more sense if you were talking about an animal rather than a human.

Make some pretend-shocked expression, like she’d just shattered all their expectations about how good, feminine women should behave.

Or - no. Like she’d tried to shatter them and failed; a child stamping on a glass ceiling with kid shoes on.

Sam didn’t look shocked, though, or amused, or like anything of any real significance had happened. “Hey, did Steve ever do that thing he does where he forgets both his ears work right and start singing like he’s trying to be heard in Canada?”

Sharon rolled her eyes, glad to be able to think of a fond memory from that time, rather than all the complicated ones. “I almost burst the front door down with my gun the first time. He’s lucky I was an agent, really, any other neighbour would have been shoving passive-aggressive little notes under his door from day one.”

She smiled as she talked, because something in her was started to trust Sam. She liked how he didn’t hold her days as Kate-the-nurse against her, liked that he understood she’d just been doing her job and had taken no pleasure in deceiving Steve.

She liked - oh.

She liked Sam, she realised, and it didn’t even come as much of a surprise.

* * *

Sharon was at work when her phone rang. It was a StarkTech phone, customisable in a thousand different ways, and right then it was on the setting that meant only one number could reach her.

She left the briefing she was in, knowing her colleagues would understand - knowing they would mourn, in their own ways, later; the intelligence community was tighter-knit than the public might think, and everyone in it owed a debt to Margaret Carter of one kind or another - and answered, keeping her voice steady with a great deal of effort.

No-one could blame her if she fell apart right now. No-one _would_ blame her. 

But she couldn’t quite let herself, not here, not where people could see her.

Peggy had died very peacefully, very quietly, she learned, and she felt like a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding had just released itself into the air.

Peace can be its own sort of shock, in a way. Her and her family had still been half-expecting an assassination attempt, or for some other disaster - that was just how their minds worked, when they were the relatives of the former director of one of the best intelligence agencies in the world. Former agency, she reminded herself for the hundredth time.

* * *

Sam, Nat and Steve sat together at the funeral. She kept her eyes moving around the room as she gave her speech, not settling on anyone for too long, but she could feel them in every word, and she stood tall as she spoke. 

Afterwards, there were what felt like a thousand politicians and generals and celebrities waiting to offer their condolences, and by the time Sharon had escaped Steve and Sam had been called away, off on some mission that - for once - had nothing to do with

Sharon should maybe be worried about Steve stamping down all his emotions, the way he had an annoying tendency to do, but it wasn’t her place to say anything. She knew so much about Steve, and yet she didn’t know him at all. She knew Peggy’s Steve, not this one. And she had her own grieving to do.

Nat was there. Of course she was. They curled up together, in their plain little hotel room in a corner of Soho, and as the rain trickled down the windowpanes outside, painting the walls with a dim kind of half-light, Sharon finally let herself cry.

* * *

“Hey,” Sam said the next time she saw him, looking serious in a way that told her exactly what was coming next. “I’m sorry about your aunt. I know I said it at the funeral, but I really am. I wish I’d had the chance to know her.”

Sharon swallowed. She never knew quite how to answer true condolences, the ones where she knew the person giving them was sincere. She’d dealt with so many phony ones, from politicians and agents and even distant relatives, all of them the type of people who had their own ideas about just where a woman’s place was, all of them people who Peggy had either disliked or ignored. Or who she'd never even known existed, in more than a few cases.

Sam, though. Peggy hadn’t known him, but she’d liked him anyway. Had asked Sharon questions about the new man in Steve’s life, in that particular way she had - teasing, but with some hidden meaning underneath.

There was so often a hidden meaning in conversations with Peggy. Sharon had learned that when she was very young, and had kept on relearning it in different ways, over the years.

“Thank you,” she said, hoping he’d be able to tell how much she meant it.

* * *

**How would you feel about me maybe asking someone else out?** she texted Nat a few weeks later, hitting send before she could second-guess herself. She pocketed her phone again, determined not to stare at it waiting for the reply. She knew that Nat had been on a handful of dates over the past few years; they’d long ago had the monogamy talk and decided it wasn’t for them, but she still felt nervous.

She didn’t want to just go on one date with Sam, was the thing. 

She checked it after ten minutes, pretending to herself she just wanted to know what time it was.

Nat had replied already.

**Sam or Steve?**

Sharon was torn between laughing, rolling her eyes, and genuine surprise. She knew Nat was good at reading people; she’d be dead a thousand times over if she wasn’t. But she hadn’t thought her maybe-feelings for Sam had been at all obvious.

They hadn’t even been obvious to Sharon, and she wondered if Nat had known even before she had.

Her phone lit up again, and she glanced down.

**Either way go for it, but Steve will say no.**

Thanks, Nat, Sharon thought dryly. 

It’s not like she’d been expected Nat to sugarcoat anything; she’d accepted long ago that she was in love with someone who thought bluntness was its own form of kindness - and maybe she was even right.

And she didn’t want to ask Steve out, anyway. Maybe they’d end up as some kind of friends, maybe not. She hoped so, but she wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it.

Sam, though. 

She really did like him. And it wasn’t like they saw each other much, but they both lived in DC. They’d exchanged numbers, and they sent each other messages occasionally - nothing very significant, just check-ins and a few swapped stories, but maybe even that casualness was significant in its own way?

She didn’t want to overthink this. She hovered her thumb over Sam’s number, and pressed dial before she could change her mind again.

* * *

Sharon and Sam’s first date was a disaster. In the best way possible. The table they’d reserved had been double-booked and they hadn’t wanted to move the couple who’d got their first, so they’d ended up at a tiny two-top right by the kitchen doors, where they could very clearly hear the dulcet tones of Iron Maiden blasting out, punctuated by the occasional crash and loud swear words.

Their food was late, and Sharon had requested no mayo, but her burger was covered in it anyway. The wrong wine was brought to their table, and there was a draft every time the kitchen door swung open.

But she didn’t care about any of that.

Sam told her stories about his days as a line cook, and Sharon - who had never needed to work a service job in her life - listened in genuine interest, answering with her own stories as a junior agent in SHIELD.

She told him about how she’d decided to apply under her mother’s maiden name, not wanting to coast through the recruitment process as the Director’s great-niece, and she could tell that Sam understood her reasoning even before she explained it to him.

She’d been worried they would end up talking about Steve too much; after all, he was the reason they’d met. But they only mentioned him a couple of times, in the end, and Sharon wondered how she could ever have been worried about them finding themselves with a lack of things to talk about.

Sharon walked Sam back to his house after dinner, because they were only a few streets over. He didn’t invite her in, but she kissed him on the doorstop, and they laughed together at how very first-date it all was, and she walked away smiling.

* * *

“Want to go on a date?” Sam asked one night, when they were lying in bed together, Sharon’s mind filled with nothing but that wonderful, blissful peace that was all too rare for her.

She rolled over, resting her head on her arm so she could look at Sam. “We go on dates all the time,” she pointed out, determined to not feel embarrassed at how drowsy her voice sounded. 

_All the time_ might have been a bit of an exaggeration. She was busy with the CIA, and Sam was busy with the VA and the occasional times he joined Steve in the hunt for Bucky.

“Not with Nat,” Sam said lightly, and Sharon abruptly felt a lot more awake.

“Oh,” she said, turning the idea over in her mind, trying it on for size. “You - you and Nat?”

Sam blinked slowly. “Not really,” he said. “That wasn’t what I meant. I’m not angling for a threesome here -”

“Nat’s ace anyway, remember,” Sharon interrupted. “And she doesn’t do sex,” she added, because she knew those two things didn’t always correlate.

“Right,” Sam said, quirking the corner of his mouth up in a half-smile. “I know. She’s my friend too. I just meant - she and I are friends, and you two are - partners, and me and you are dating. Why shouldn’t we all go out to dinner?”

It sounded so simple, when it was all laid out like that. Or - as simple as anything in her life ever got, which wasn’t very. 

Not that Sharon minded. She’d never expected her life to be straightforward, and if she’d wanted it to be she would never have joined SHIELD in the first place.

“Okay,” she found herself saying, and she leaned over and kissed Sam quickly. “That sounds nice.”

It did, she realised after she’d said it. She wasn’t sure quite how it was going to work, but maybe that didn’t matter. Hopefully it would just _work,_ without anyone needing to think about how.

* * *

They decided to cook dinner together, at Sam’s house, instead of going out. Nat wasn’t a fan of public dates, which Sharon could understand. And besides, this saved them an evening of confused glances from people wanting to know why Sharon occasionally held hands with both the other people at the table.

Nat was a very - experimental cook. “It might work,” she said, hovering the little jar of chilli powder over the pot on the stove, with a very teasing look on her face.

Sam tilted the jar upwards, safely away from the already-flavoured risotto. “I thought white people were afraid of too much spice,” he said, plucking the jar from Nat’s hand and passing her a knife instead. “Chop some tomatos instead?”

“I can do that,” Nat said solemnly, and proceeded to slice way too many tomatos with a speed and dexerity that was, quite frankly, a little scary.

“You’re ridiculous,” Sharon said fondly, brushing the back of her hand against Nat’s arm.

“You love me anyway,” Nat said easily, and Sharon couldn’t help but smile at that. It had taken a long, long time before Nat was comfortable even hearing those words - having her speak them herself, in front of someone else, was the best gift Sharon could imagine.

“I do,” she said, softly. She glanced at Sam. “I love you both.”

This should be weird, maybe. But it wasn’t, not at all, and she was too glad of that to want to second-guess anything.

“I love you too,” Nat said to Sam. “Platonically, of course.”

Sam grinned. “No hetero, you mean?”

Dinner preparations had to be put on hold for a few minutes, to give them all time to recover from the fit of laughter that brought on, and Sharon ended up just watching Sam and Nat for a few moments.

She was so lucky, she thought. She didn’t care anymore what people’s perceptions of her, or of them, might be. Let them think what they want to.

She knew how much she had to be grateful for, and she wasn’t about to let a single person question it.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked!!!
> 
> For more Natasha/Sharon relationship development, you might like [Light of the Grave,](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8517730) and if you're after more fluffy polyamory involving them the second half of [Our Hearts on Fire](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8557183/chapters/19619041) is basically that (read the tags though, first half is angsty!).


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